how can it be "pop" if it is unpopular?

Because all music can always become mainstream.

I think it goes more like, --- all music can eventually be watered down for the mainstream

hence POP SUCKS

i dont know where you came up with that assesment. that would require mass amounts of people to start liking music that is not immediate accesible and satisfying. the masses of people dont care about art or engaging themselves in it, they just want a catchy tune to listen on the radio on the way to work. i cant see my little sistor adding to live and shave in la to her itunes anytime soon, because she just lieks singalong dancabke tunes. nothing bad about it, but some music can just never me mainstream.

All music is popular once it starts getting more and more known.

Maybe because I have always been able to listen to pop and really like it, and things that are considered "uncool" by the masses. I guess it's just my biases when I say all music can be pop.

ornette coleman is well known but not ever popular. hell, hard bop was not popular, not like the white boy swing of the benny goodmans and such.

not everything gets popular, not everything gets known, not even close. more crazy shit falls by the wayside or is lost or forgotten or ignored than ever gets to be known or in mass consciousness.

i like pop music too, i like all music. but to say that all music can beceome popular, or that all music even has the potential to gain popularity, is absurd.

I definitely disagree. All music has the potential to become popular. While it's unlikely that TLASILA will ever become popular, to say that it doesn't have the potential to do so is just incorrect. The only thing that makes a group popular is the amount of people that like them. While it's unlikely that said group will ever become popular in the manstream, it's certainly possible if the collective concience shifts it's notion of good music to the likes of TLASILA.


People 800 hundred years ago would have thought Picasso to be a shit artist. Art evolves just like everything else.

i think picasso would have been seen as a genius in any age.

that is what is called transcendent talent, da vinci, newton, einstein, picasso, beethoven, bach, in ANY age they would be seen as titans!

Pop music is as much a style as it is a referece to something which is popular. Anything might be able to become popular, but that doesn't necessarily make it 'pop'. St Etienne sell far less records than Garth Brooks, but will always be more 'pop' than him, even if they are less 'popular'.

Predicting the future of general public taste is for insipid fashion columnists. If Picasso lived today, the mainstream art culture would call him shit. A lot of strange things happen with retrospect. Let's not project these strange things onto the future.

Tell me the story about "alternative rock" again, grandpa.

That's not true, some of the people whose name you have mentioned weren't deemed geniuses in their age and there's no guarantee that they would have been deemed as such in this one.

Indeed, ideas of quality and 'genius' change through the ages. This is especially so in art and literature, but is even evident in the relatively short time-span of 'pop music'. I remember in the 80s and much of the 90s when you couldn't give Black Sabbath albums away. Now they're celebrated as the champions of all things Metal. That's a hell of a shift within the last ten years.

The Structures of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

You've kind of painted yourself into a corner by use of the word "noise", seeing as that term tends, these days, to refer to a particular genre whose whole raison d' etre is abrasiveness and thus, to the masses, unlistenability. I like non-mainstream music, but if you (as someone who knows about non-mainstream music) asked me why I like Noise (note the capital "N" to denote the genre rather than the subjective opinion), I'd say "I don't". Someone who doesn't know about non-mainstream music would be more likely to ask "why do you like this noise (or, more likely, this racket)?", and I would explain to them (or try to, anyway) that there are beautiful melodies in this music, just as much as in the more mainstream stuff that they listen to, and that I just happen to like the context in which those melodies are set in this particular music.

who? Each of them was considered a trascendent genius!
and if they lived at any other time they would have been just as amazing. I don;t mean pick up da vinci from italy and de[posit him in the 1800's, bu8t if davinci was born later, and lived through those time slike he lived through his, he would have been just as praised. I have no doubt about it.

metal heads have always worshipped at the sabbath teat, NON stop, with no pause, since their inception. it is the mainstream losers, the people who need everything watered down for them, that did not pay attention, and due to sabbath's inherent worth, have to pay attention now.

genius is genius. it transcends time. Pythagoras would be a genius today if he ahd all the knowledge we have and could put it to use. Same goes for any other transcendent mind.

What do all these intellectuals from years gone by have to do with noise?

I tell people I like noise rock because that "noise" best mirrors what I have running through my head at any time. I ahve always loved static, I find it ridiculously soothing, and sleep inducing, just dead static on a TV turned to a channel with no signal. Oh man, I am getting sleepy now thinking about it.

Argue about it all you like.

Again, I can only speak for Britain here, but honestly, in the 80s, Sabbath were way off the radar for a significant section of the country's metallers. During the Thrash period, for example, they were way down the pecking order. The bands themselves may have given the odd nod to Ozzy, et al, but for the average teenager listening to Among the Living or Rust in Peace, they really were just one of those bands their vaguely cool uncle tended to like. I can't say this for America, and I'm even sure that some British posters here might disagree with me, but from my own experience of growing up in Britain at that time and listening to Thrash, I can honestly say that that's how I remember things.

hey demon, every single thrash/speed metal band constantly gave the highest praise and admiration to sabbath, and every metal fan I ever ran into gave praise to sabbath, the ozzy sabbath, not the dio sabbath.
britain tends to be a more trendy flash in the pan in it's admiration for music and bands, and that may be part of it, but the original black sabbath was always foremost in most every american metalhead's mind, I am sure of it.

I can't argue with that. America always seemed a bit more 'grass roots' in that respect, atleast compared with Britain. Which isn't to say that having such a grass roots attitude is necessarily that good a thing. Or maybe I just think that because I'm British.

The theoretical meaning of the polarisation of noise has been disputed since the 17th century. Two types of meaning are given to the balance of the noise influx into the appropriated artistic meanderings of the noise maker. This concept is not so hard to grasp if one is familiar with volatile notation.

sarramkrop is like the noise Buddha

i don't think it's a coincidence that americans tend to take this mindset and that america has been far more consistent in its production of good rock music over the last 40 years

I entirely love you for posting that. Although I'm more of a Lakatos/ Feyeraband kind of guy.

EDIT: and it was entirely appropriate to this thread, although I find it's very difficult to place 'paradigm shifts' within artistic fields younger than a century.

what youre saying makes no fucking sense to me at all. mainstream music is mainstream because its easily accesible. iannis xenakis made experimental music a long fucking time ago, and its still not popular. or maybe you just have a broder definition of popular than me. either way, this arguement is pointless.